Snow report: Met Office needs funds

Waves crash over the promenade in Blackpool as severe gales and rain hit the western side of the UK

The Government should consider providing extra funding to the Met Office to help improve its long-term forecasting, a report by MPs into last December's snow disruption has said.

The current seasonal predictions "do not provide a firm basis on which decision makers can act with confidence", the report from the House of Commons Transport Committee said.

The committee said Transport Secretary Philip Hammond had put a £10 million price tag on the additional computing power needed by the Met Office to provide more accurate decade-long forecasts.

The committee's chairman, Louise Ellman MP, said: "Ministers must look again at the resources available to the Met Office.

"Given the huge cost of winter weather disruption to the economy - some £280 million per day in transport disruption alone - the £10 million suggested by Mr Hammond would be a small price to pay to improve the Met Office's long-range forecasting capability."

Looking at the impact on transport of the ultra-cold and snowy December 2010 weather, the committee's report said more could and should be done to ensure UK transport networks continued to operate in severe winter weather.

The committee said Heathrow airport was totally unprepared to recover from any major incident which necessitated its closure and that its owners under-invested in winter resilience equipment; Mr Hammond should appoint a "snow supremo" - a senior Department for Transport official who would oversee snow plans at Heathrow and other airports - and extra investment should be targeted on those parts of the travel network which have shown themselves to be least resilient to bad weather.

Launching the report, Mrs Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, said: "Every airport operator must now be pushed to plan properly for bad weather so that people are not left stranded and without even basic supplies in airport terminals for days on end."

The Met Office said: "Throughout the cold weather, the Met Office provided consistently good advice. Of 13 individual spells of severe weather, the Met Office forecast provided very good advice on 12 of them. In a public survey in November following heavy snow, 80% of people surveyed said they were aware of the warning and 95% of those found the warning useful."

The Met Office statement went on: "We have already shown significant skill in long-range forecasting and, although it remains scientifically challenging, we will work with the cross-departmental working group established by Mr Hammond to consider the issues and optimum investment."